Ways to Connect

Sliger Data Center Upgrades Coming

Changes and upgrades are coming to the Sliger Data Center. To facilitate these, some tenants will be moving, and there will be some outages for power upgrades in the coming year.

We are working with FSU Facilities and H2 Engineering to bring some much-needed upgrades to the Sliger Data Center. This facility provides hosting for the High Performance Computing Cluster and other RCC resources, but we have room for departments to host their own servers and racks as well.

Some of the benefits for hosting at Sliger include:

managed power, cooling, and network infrastructure

diesel generators with several days of uptime (for example, Sliger remained online through the duration of Hurricane Hermine in 2016)

managed security

FSU would like to encourage academic departments and research groups to consider hosting your academic resources at Sliger rather than build your own server rooms. Departments with administrative and enterprise requirements should consider hosting your resources at NWRDC.

On Tuesday, September 25, we held a Town-Hall Meeting to discuss some of the upcoming changes to the Sliger facility, along with some things that current tenants can expect in the coming months. Some highlights of that meeting include:

We are building a new wall between what was previously the operator room and the main server room (see figure "A" below). The operator room will be turned over to the College of Engineering.

We will be replacing the power transfer switch so that the power does not need to be switched over manually in the event of City of Tallahassee power loss. This will be a big benefit to all tenants, but it will require some down-time to install. Details about the time and date for the at down time will be posted far in advance as soon as we have more information.

Existing tenant racks will be moving to new locations. We will coordinate with each department to find a suitable time and date to perform the move, and will provide whatever labor is needed to help complete the move. There are two reasons for this:

The current layout of the data center is not optimized for efficient cooling

There are some server racks in rooms that are going to re-purposed

ITS will be implementing rates for colocation hosting at Sliger some time in the future. Currently, the service has been offered for free to departments. We anticipate the rates will be somewhere around 10-15% of the cost of NWRDC. Tenants will be notified far in advance of any rates being implemented.

A schedule for changes and downtime is not available yet, since we are still very early in the project. As the project moves forward, we will reach out to existing tenants and also post information here to let everyone know what is happening.